Having seen a recent piece about Holographic Storage, I think that Blu-Ray may be obsolete before it arrives. At present they can make little squares of plastic that will hold 20Gb Holographic data, at transfer rates faster than Hard Drives, for about a pound, the trouble is the drive itself costs over £1000. Once they crack that problem, the fallout could be huge.

My advice? Stick with what you have for now, and hold out for holographic.

davecs wrote:Having seen a recent piece about Holographic Storage, I think that Blu-Ray may be obsolete before it arrives. At present they can make little squares of plastic that will hold 20Gb Holographic data, at transfer rates faster than Hard Drives, for about a pound, the trouble is the drive itself costs over £1000. Once they crack that problem, the fallout could be huge.

My advice? Stick with what you have for now, and hold out for holographic.

That's the impression I got. Holographic can also use the thickness of the medium not just the surface area, so in theory, you can gave many TeraBytes of data on a medium the size of a CD Rom, but possibly a little thicker. And there are fewer moving parts also. The medium does not have to move, for example so does not have to be a disk.

It was in Micro Mart a couple of months ago. The scary thing is that they can knock media out pretty cheap (though not with the density they expect in the future). Its the read/write mechanism that costs, and at present that is prohibitive. I seem to remember they were confident about data integrity, ie bits keeping their values until told otherwise. But think about it - faster than a Hard Drive. No moving parts. Removeable. Huge storage capacity.

They'll be a lot of investment to recoup before the price is affordable "for the rest of us", but all storage media both internal and external could be holographic. Goodbye Hard Drive, Flash Drive, CD, DVD, Bluray, you name it, Goodbye!